NO TO DISINFORMATION AND HISTORICAL REVISIONISM

DISINFORMATION is a vile tactic to deliberately mislead and mis-educate the people. Its harms cannot be overstated in this period where no less than the country’s future is at stake in one of the most important political exercises that the people will participate in.

Voters must discern truths from falsehoods, and reject the lies that only seek to poison their sound judgment.

Consider this: Fifty years ago, the nation woke up to static noise and station IDs emanating from radio and television sets; no newspapers selling at the corner store. Having imposed martial law over the entire archipelago, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. ordered to close down some 93 national and community newspapers and magazines, seven television stations and 292 radio stations. “Mission accomplished,” reported the police and military by the end of September 23, 1972.

Thousands of journalists, columnists, editors, radio and television personnel, including media owners and press freedom advocates were red-tagged as “subversives.” They were summarily arrested, thrown behind bars, tortured, and murdered.

Under the fascist Marcos dictatorship, press freedom in the Philippines suffered the most brutal and most vicious attacks. The people’s right to freedom of expression and information were muffled — and only media controlled by Marcos and his cronies were allowed, but only to disseminate the dictatorship’s myths and disinformation.

The people, however, put up a gallant resistance: activists, journalists, dissidents, and critics established networks of underground publications and eventually aboveground papers — the socalled “mosquito press” — that exposed the abuses and corruption of the fascist Marcos dictatorship. They reported on people’s struggles against tyranny.

Defiant truth-telling kept the fire of resistance ablaze, the fervor upholding the movement that ultimately overthrew the dictator, his family, military cohorts and cronies in 1986. Now, there are efforts to revise history or whitewash it. Haslo! In the words of Inday Loren’s son Lorenzo, “The litany of Marcos crimes is not something to be debated. Their atrocities are fact. To even have to state that is patently absurd. To push back against these truths is to declare yourself an enemy of justice; of the thousands whose lives and families have been destroyed.”

Say mo, Monsignor Oso?